DataNucleus 2.2.0 release

http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=61486

Congrats to the team!

SFDC Database.com versus Windows SQL Azure

http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/preliminary-comparison-of-databasecom.html

Que le meilleur gagne ! (and it is SQL Azure :-)

Data is the Next Major Layer of the Cloud

http://www.cloudave.com/8607/data-is-the-next-major-layer-of-the-cloud-a-major-victory-for-startups/

I cannot agree more.
But Amazon is not alone, Microsoft Azure and SQL Azure also provides an efficient and well-integrated solution.

Please also note the brand new initiative from SalesForce.com with database.com

Clearly, data is the sweet spot of the Cloud.

Nasdaq Data as a Service

http://blog.programmableweb.com/2010/11/08/nasdaq-continues-the-data-as-a-service-trend/

We'll see more and more business data sources exposed as data services.
This is more or less what Microsoft Azure DataMarket tends to generalize.
Today it is mostly limited to read-only kind of access, but I'm confident data manipulation services will follow soon.

Now, the 2 big questions:

1. How to widely enable all these data services, 
2. and how to easily combine these external data services with other heterogeneous data models?

This is exactly where Data Services Platforms have a great role to play.

Data services client for WP7

Seen during PDC 2010:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astoriateam/archive/2010/10/28/data-services-client-for-win-phone-7-now-available.aspx

http://odata.codeplex.com/

Big data

Interesting series of videos by Jeff Jonas, "Mister Data" at IBM:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/27/big-data/

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data

Two problems:
1. How to deal with huge volume of data? How to exploit it, understand trends, cycles, etc. ?
2. How to bring sense, meaning into that big data?

For #1, see Attivio, ClickFox or Aqumin for new technologies being able to nicely display huge amount of real-time data.

For #2, connect data together, build a context around it. It's all about semantics.

Data as a Service example in the Finance Industry

http://blog.programmableweb.com/2010/10/26/stock-data-api-hints-at-future-of-data-as-a-service/